Via the good folks at KTAR.com. What a bizarre headline.
Funny they don't mention the Christmas Eve escape attempt at ASPC-Tucson/Manzanita. Think that still hasn't hit the mainstream press? No one ever talks about it... More on all this another time. Here's just the news, for now.
PHOENIX -- State officials have released a revised request for 5,000 additional private prison beds following a months-long review prompted by three inmates' escape from a privately operated state prison near Kingman last summer.
Corrections Director Charles Ryan canceled the original request for proposals last September, saying it needed stronger requirements on security and operations to avoid repeats of the July 30 escape.
The three violent offenders who broke out have been apprehended. Two face charges of murdering an Oklahoma couple in New Mexico while on the loose.
Ryan has said the Kingman prison was riddled with security flaws that the department's oversight failed to detect.
The department released the new 186-page request for proposals for providing beds for minimum- and medium-security male inmates on Monday. A 14-page amendment was released Wednesday.
The new request includes detailed provisions on security, including ones requiring both random and scheduled perimeter checks of prisons. The original, now-canceled version didn't have those specifics.
The Kingman escapees were able to avoid the prison's scheduled perimeter patrol by timing its movements, enabling them to cut through fencing. They had made getaway arrangements with an alleged accomplice by using a telephone tossed into the prison yard, authorities said.
Also, the department said the revision include new requirements for reporting of problems, expanded evaluation criteria for proposals additional sanctions for violations, including those that pose a risk to public safety.
Under the state's request, proposals can be for the entire 5,000 beds or submitted in increments of 500. It said the state wants 2,000 beds available by April 2013 and an additional 3,000 by April 2015.
The request said the state could provide state-owned land at existing prison complexes in Florence, Buckeye, Litchfield Park and Yuma available for use.
The deadline to submit proposals is Feb. 24.
The Kingman escape became an issue in last year's gubernatorial race, with Democratic nominee Terry Goddard running a television spot attacking incumbent Gov. Jan Brewer in connection with the Kingman prison break.
Two of the three escapees and an alleged accomplice are charged with murdering Gary and Linda Haas of Tecumseh, Okla., in eastern New Mexico's Guadalupe County, and the Goddard ad questioned whether Arizonans should feel safe with Brewer as governor.
Brewer, a Republican, was elected to a full term on Nov. 2.
The 5,000-bed expansion program was authorized under a 2009 law.
Arizona's prison system houses approximately 40,000 inmates, including nearly 5,300 in private facilities. Those include 2,200 at the Kingman prison. The state's public prisons house approximately 34,700 inmates, above the design capacity of just over 31,000.
In 1993 the newly inaugurated President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, announced that the top priority of his administration would be "health care reform." The Clinton Administration set deadlines by which congress must take action, but month after month went by and despite bills emerging from committee, in the end nothing was ever brought to the floor.
With all the delays 1993 turned into 1994, a re-election year for Congress, and the members became fearful that passing controversial legislation for which there was a lot of public opposition might be dangerous to their political survival. They were right, but too late. That November the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress and the Clinton presidency was essentially over, with national policy being set by Newt Gingrich and the other Republican leaders in Congress.
Will President Barack Obama get "Clintoned" in the same way 16 years later? Democrats are concerned over the growing feeling that they've seen this show before - a popular president enters office on a wave of "change" only to find the public revolting against that change and shutting down the president's agenda in the first mid-term election. And no one has forgotten that the issue that triggered the Democrat bloodbath of 1994 was healthcare.
Yet even if Obama ends up being "Clintoned" in 2010 it may not be the end for him personally. Bill Clinton managed to get re-elected despite the healthcare debacle and the bloodbath of '94, because upon taking over Congress the Republicans immediately passed a wave of pro-business legislation that caused the economy to boom. Clinton then rode that good economy to re-election in 1996. If returned to power in 2010 the Republicans would probably once again pursue economic revitalizing policies that Obama can then try to claim credit for.
Therefore Democrats can still cling to the crumb of comfort that even if 2010 is a repeat of 1994, like Clinton before him the loss of congress may only mean the end of the President's policy agenda, not the end of Obama's political career. Especially if the Republicans repeat the mistake in 2012 that they made in 1996, when they put their weakest candidate forward in the form of Bob Dole.
The Globe on Matty
There is a must-read article in the Boston Globe today by Kevin Cullen about Springfield's former District Attorney Matty Ryan, who died last month.
Matthew J. Ryan Jr. was district attorney in Hampden County for 32 years. He was DA longer than anyone in any county ever was and probably ever will be. They don’t make DAs like Matty Ryan anymore. Then again, the world he occupied simply doesn’t exist anymore.
He was more powerful than any mayor, any congressman, anybody in all of Western Massachusetts. He was like a sheriff in the Wild West. Over a huge swath of land, on either side of the Connecticut River, the only law was Matty Ryan’s law. There was a lot of good in that, and there was some bad.
There was a gay rights demonstration at UMass, but by the time I got there the rally was over and the protest signs trashed.
Thieves beware!
Amherst Parade
These are some pictures I didn't use in my previous Amherst 250th birthday coverage. Here are some Amherst vets.
This guy was dressed to honor the veterans of the Civil War.
The Army National Guard Band waiting to march.
A woman dressed for the 1700's.
Kids marching for the Amherst Survival Center.
Granville Beauty
Longtime Springfield troublemaker Michaelann Bewsee (above) took some nice pictures in nearby Granville recently. Frankly, this time of year it's hard not to capture great images of the magnificent New England foliage, like this scene from the Westfield River.
Autumn teaches us that there is beauty even in decline.
So treasure every day of Autumn as precious.
Today's Video
Come back unchanged, your demons all tamed and your flowers uncut.
The last time I saw Matty Ryan (above right with Eddie Boland) was at Charlie Ryan's mayoral victory celebration in 2003. That night was a far cry from eight years earlier when Charlie lost to Mike Albano. At Charlie's Forest Park headquarters that year the champagne had been served despite Charlie's defeat, but everyone was so dispirited hardly anyone even felt like getting drunk. I may have been one of the exceptions.
As we were leaving that night, suddenly a car festooned with Albano stickers came roaring past Ryan headquarters with tires squealling, the car filled with what looked and sounded like young men. Suddenly two naked rear ends emerged from the front and back windows as people inside taunted "Ha, ha you losers!" As the car sped off a cop who had been inside came out and asked if anyone recognised who was in the car, but no one did.
However, in the days which followed I thought I did recognise in the newspaper some of the people in that car, as Albano announced his appointees, but I couldn't be sure because the photos were frontal ones, and I would've needed to see them from the rear.
But the victory celebration eight years later was much different. The roof was practically blown off the place by the partying crowd, and considering that this was at the John Boyle O'Reilly Club, which has seen some rowdy scenes, that's saying something. However, suddenly someone entered the room, someone of such stature that everyone who saw him had to nudge the person next to them to make sure they saw him too. It was someone no one had seen at political events for a long time, but who had once moved through Valley politics as a giant. It was former Hampden County District Attorney Matthew Ryan.
It impressed me that Matty Ryan had the power, by his mere presense, to momentarily calm that rowdy crowd. But as he and Charlie exchanged greetings, I realized it was more than the fact that no one had seen Matty much in recent years that caused everyone to pause and look. It occurred to me that many people present had never made the connection before that Charlie and Matty were related, and that failure perhaps was not surprising. After all, Charlie was Mr. Reform and Matty was considered Mr. Anti-reform. That Matty had come out to celebrate the fall of the corrupt Albano regime was something that few would have predicted.
But then Matty Ryan was a man of numerous contradictions. In his more than three decades as D.A. he had developed a devoted following as well as fierce critics. There were those who described him as a living legend, while to others he was the embodiment of all that was wrong with Springfield. In the end he was never as good as his supporters claimed, but also not as bad as his critics accused him of being.
Perhaps nothing is more criticized about Ryan's career than his refusal to prosecute the suspected murderer of Danny Croteau, the Reverend Richard Lavigne. But those critics have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and the passage of time. People forget how untouchable the Catholic Church was in those years, and how many would have condemned Ryan for attacking the church - to which Ryan himself belonged. In fact to this day there are those who say that the Croteau case was overblown in the media in order to embarrass the church. Lavigne was also a political figure, especially prominent in the anti-war movement. Had he been prosecuted, it would have splashed mud on an entire young generation of aspiring Democrat Party leaders, many of whom went on to become city councilors, mayors and beyond.
The Croteau murder also took place in an era of high homophobia. Trying the case would have brought out information about the victim's sexuality that would have been devastating to the family if revealed in public. Do any of these things mean Ryan should not have gone ahead with the prosecution anyway, and disgraced the church, subjected the victim to homophobic hate and destroyed a whole generation of the political party of which Ryan himself was a member?
Yes, despite these risks Ryan was still wrong. Danny Croteau was a victim of an evil web of hypocricy and denial in a crime that still cries out for justice. But it would have taken an extraordinary person to face the firestorm that such a prosecution would have caused, with no guarantee that in the end Lavigne would have been convicted. That Ryan was not the superman who could face all that may show that he was weak, and that he was human but not necessarily that he was evil.
Matty Ryan was also criticized for his alleged "mob connections" and in a sane world he should never have kept the company he sometimes did. But there was a weird libertarian sense in which his mob friendships made sense. In a world where the drug trade is forced underground by its illegality, it is difficult to have any control over it. It was said that Ryan had a deal with the mob that as long as they kept to the shadier side of business, like gambling and drugs and loan sharking, he would look the other way on some things, provided they stayed out of City Hall and didn't sell heroin. Of course heroin came in anyway through non-mob sources, but it was much less prevalent and the mob was unable to get their hands on public funds.
Once Matty retired, the streets were flooded with heroin, and it was through mob wiretaps that the corruption probes of the last ten years reached into City Hall, where the mob had quickly began infiltrating after Ryan was gone.
Ironically it was not any of these alleged sins that caused Matty Ryan to retire. In the end, Ryan's brand of blunt, in your face advocacy had become considered old fashioned. With the arrival of the era of District Attorneys with blow-dry haircuts and focus group tested campaigns, someone like Matty had become slightly embarrassing. It wasn't the scandals that led to the conclusion that Matty should go. It was the sense that his crusty style had become "unprofessional."
So the passing of Matty Ryan is rightly called the end of an era. We are unlikely to see his like again. In some ways we are better off for that, but we have lost something too.
In Hamp Windows
For enlightened bumpers.
A mistake.
Elvis in Faces.
It's a new dawn.
Today's Video
As promised, something from Northampton's Lookstock - a killer version of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. (photo of the sky over Lookstock by Greg Saulmon)
Here is some more of my past correspondence. These e-mails are related to people who are well known for one reason or another.
Ken Babbs is the former sidekick of author Ken Kesey and co-founder of the Merry Pranksters. I wrote a review of one of the CD's he and the Pranksters made and suggested that he should write his autobiography. This was his reply:
From : capn skyp skyp@skypilotclub.com To : "Tom Devine" baystateob@hotmail.com Subject : Re: Forta July 03 Date : Fri, 05 Sept 2003 11:05:34 -0700
Hey Tom, thanks for the review. The bit about Feg Shui being like a Zappa thing was right on. I guess I'll always be known as a prankster; like kesey says, "Yah never quits dah mob," but the Forta July CD is a skypilot collaboration which is why it is all new material, done on the spot, with some tweaking on the computer. The signature piece for me is Figaro de la Goof, performed spontaneously in the spirit of Neal Cassady, dubbed The Holy Goof by his buddy, Jack Kerouac. Yeah, the skypilots are a move forward from pranksterdom which took a major hit when kesey died. skypilotclub allows us to explore new realms, go where sluggards fear to fly.
Thanks for the bouquet on my trombone playing.
Zane's site has all the news about the upcoming Kesey symposium in November, plus two books coming out at the same time: kesey's jail journal and spit7, which is all about kesey.
Skypilot Band on a national tour? hoisted aloft on a blimp and play across country from a platform dangling below spending so much time living my autobiography I'm lacking the time to write one but occasionally a noodle or two appears on the website slurped with pungent sauce.
Ken Babbs
In 2003 I wrote an article wondering what happened to Stephen Geoffrey's the once very popular 80's star who had disappeared into gay pornography. I received this mystery letter claiming to be from someone within the porn industry who refused to use their real name.
I had the pleasure of directing Stephen Geoffreys in a few videos, the best of which, I think, was LEATHER INTRUSION CASE 2: THE SPIDER'S KISS. He did a scene with Drew Andrews.
Stephen was great to work with. Always enthusiastic and eager to do what was required of him. His acting in porn left something to be desired, though. I thought he was wonderful in FRIGHT NIGHT, FRATERNITY VACATION and his other movies, but check out his acting in my video LEATHER AFTER MIDNIGHT. Hmmmm. Maybe by then he'd stopped caring about that part of his career.
He was having money problems, combined with drug problems. That is why he went into porn when the mainstream film world stopped calling him. His hair was thinning, to the point where he started wearing a hairpiece (sometimes he wore a cap just to take a break). We had a sit-down talk one day, and he told me about how he'd like to get back into doing movies, but he thought his porn career would prevent that. I told him that his main fan base were the horror fans, and that they wouldn't care if he was gay or did porn. They just wanted to see him as Evil Ed again, or in 976-EVIL III. He told me that he'd recently gone to a horror movie convention and was thrilled by the attention he got there. No one brought up "Sam Ritter". He seemed uplifted by our talk, and I hoped it might stir him to get back into the swing of it, but soon after, I heard he'd moved to San Francisco to avoid some people he owed money to.
But the gay porn thing was not something he was really ashamed of. Not too long after that, I helped the editor-in-chief of "Scarlet Street" magazine find Stephen for an interview, and in the magazine, he freely admitted to doing gay porn.
So, Stephen, if you're out there reading this, get in touch with me, okay?
Jett Blakk Katt
In recent years Ralph Slate has become a major and sometimes controversial figure in local historical circles. However in 2003 he was just an amateur historian who collected pictures of Springfield, and who wrote to tell me he had discovered that a photo I had run of Charlie Ryan and his supporters marching through Mason Square inadvertently solved a historical mystery.
From : "Ralph Slate" ralph.slate@hockeydb.com To : baystateob@hotmail.com Subject : Charlie Ryan Photo Date : Wed, 27 Aug 2003 10:19:02 -0400 (EDT)
Hi Tom --
I was browsing your excellent website, as I often do, and came across the photos of Charlie Ryan campaigning. One of the photos looked really familiar to me -- the one entitled "ryanmutual.jpg".
I am an amateur historian, Springfield resident, and I like to collect photos of Springfield houses. I buy them at antique shows or on eBay, and I like to try and send a copy to the owner when I can identify it. The abovementioned photo looks exactly like one of the houses I have been trying to identify. You can see it here on the right:
I'm guessing that the photo is from State St., approaching Mass Mutual, can you confirm this? I have a whole slew of photos from the same photo album, I bet I can pin them all down with this coincidental tip.
Thanks!
Ralph Slate
For a few years I did radio with Tony Gill at WAIC in Springfield. He sent me the following account of the political scene in Springfield. Of course he was just joking - or was he?
From : "Anthony Gillylan" agillylan@msn.com To : baystateob@hotmail.com Date : Mon, 19 May 2003 05:57:07
Hi Tom!
Love your commentary online! I think Dave Starr was laughing precisely because he knows the city is as corrupt and incompetent as anything he's ever published. Seuss's statue would become a huge FBI surveillance target, rightfully investigated by the Feds should Springfield take over Libraries and Museums. The Cat in the Hat would find himself handcuffed the next morning, charged with masturbating in front of the little children who sought out Seuss's books to learn basic reading skills. Then the disgraced Cat in the Hat would escort Mayor Albano to Seuss's (re-built and re-imagined) House on Mulberry Street, which he was able to purchase in a sweetheart no-interest no-pay loan arranged in a City Hall back-room deal, thanks to Artichoke Ardolino.
Of course, Gerry Philips is there waiting for the both of them. You know where this is going. Cries and Whispers: Mikey and Gerry are spotted together at local Cat House!
Best
Tony Gill
Karen Powell and her husband Bob are two of Springfield's most notorious activists. They were especially active during the Albano's era's baseball stadium scheme, which was backed by the Springfield Newspapers. That sometimes caused the Powell's to receive negative press, but when the paper made fun of Karen's brand new lower back tatoo, she could barely contain her anger and contempt.
From : Karen Powell canegroup@yahoo.com To : "Tom Devine" baystateob@hotmail.com Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 01:38:33 -0400
Tom,
About Mayor Mike's Daily Paper, I am still trying to figure out when I pulled my pants down. About the only thing they got right is that I did get a tatoo of a butterfly. It is on my lower back so sometimes I have to pull the waist on my jeans a little but I haven't shown anything that I would be arrested for showing in public.
I will be the first to admit that I am somewhat unconventional and I was really excited that I finally did go and have my tatoo. I told Bob that I had to do something to make me feel more like my old self because my basic personality is to buck the rules and I have been very establishment lately. I am certainly not going change my personality to suit a bunch of stuffed shirts who are just looking for something to pick apart about people.
For some reason when it comes to that "so called paper, " I don't see or hear the same things they do even when we are at the same place. They wrote about one meeting I went to during the stadium fiasco and I don't know which one of us was really there since I heard the opposite of what they reported. During the Needle Exchange, they wrote an editorial criticizing Sue and me for saying something at a meeting that we didn't say. We were not even at the meeting.
I think McDermott gets a little upset when things are not going his way so he shows just how petty and unprofessional he is. Maybe I should get Caron's name tatooed on my butt and as McDermott suggested, turn the other cheek. :)
The day I let that moron McDermott intimidate me is the day you will see pigs fly. I am also not going to change the way I act or think. I have always done what I feel comfortable doing and am not going to act like something I am not to make some "hot shots" happy.
The only time I get hurt is when someone that matters to me says something that hurts my feelings. When it is someone that doesn't mean anything to me, they don't have the power to hurt me. I may get angry initially but even that doesn't last. I could see McDermott's fingerprints all over that piece of trash and I have no doubt that he will do it again. Thankfully, he is one of those people that I don't care what his opinion of me is.
I did send Mr. Newhouse a fax concerning McDermott's unprofessional comments to Paul Caron when Paul announced his candidacy. I presume that may have touched a nerve. I also faxed Mr. Newhouse a copy of the piece they did in the Spfld tabloid with a few personal comments.
I always remember when Bob and I were getting married. My mother sat Bob down and gave him a pep talk because he would need it being married to me. She told him not to even try winning an argument because it wasn't possible with someone as stubborn as her daughter. She also told him he would have his hands full. My Mom knew me well. :)
Thanks Karen
In the year 2000 Pine Point's Twig Painter Richard Doyle announced that he was running for president. He wasn't on the ballot in any state, and spent no money on his campaign, but that didn't stop him from getting widespread local publicity that included a column by Tom Shea in the Springfield newspapers. I also wrote something, and Doyle sent me this letter of gratitude.
July 20, 2000
Tommy,
Thank you for your coverage of my campaign to become the first person to be elected to the Presidency of the United States without ever appearing on the ballot of a single state. I remain confident that a groundswell of write-in voters will make me the first President elected to the presidency from Western Massachusetts since former Northampton Mayor Calvin Coolidge. However, I intend to be much more dynamic than so-called "Silent Cal" about whom one wit is said to have exclaimed after he died, "How can they tell?"
One of the keys to my massive charisma is that I always accentuate the positive. As a local educator and businessman, I am dismayed by all the pessimism I encounter among the public these days. How quickly we forget how fleeting life's problems are, and how often they are resolved for the better. For example, let me recount for you a recent crisis I experienced with my most recent (female) lover.
I wished to purchase a birthday present for my girlfriend, but as we had not been together for very long, after careful consideration I decided to purchase her a pair of gloves - romantic, but not too personal. Accompanied by my sweetheart's younger sister, we went to Walmart and I purchased a lovely pair of white gloves. Her sister also purchased a joke gift to give to my girlfriend, a sexy pair of panties. We both had our purchases gift wrapped at the store, but somehow during the wrapping the clerk got the gifts mixed up, so that I walked off with the package containing the panties while the sister went home with the gloves. Since I had no way of knowing about this mix-up, I mailed the package to my lover accompanied with the following note:
"Darling . . . I chose these because I noticed that you are not in the habit of wearing any when we go out. If it had not been for your sister, I would have gotten you the long ones with buttons, but she wears short ones that are easy to remove. These are a delicate shade, but the lady I bought them from showed me the pair she had been wearing for the past three weeks, and they were hardly soiled. I had her try yours on for me and she looked really smart. I wish I was there to put them on you for the first time, as no doubt other hands will come in contact with them before I have a chance to see you again. Just think how many times I will kiss them during the coming year! I hope you will wear them for me Friday night."
Imagine my surprise when I visited on her birthday and she hauled off and slapped me in the face! Fortunately, after much explaining, we reconciled to much laughter. So Tom let your readers remember that life is short and to face piles of trials with smiles.
President-to-be Professor Richard "The Twig Painter" Doyle American International College Springfield, Massachusetts
Suicide March
We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases.
First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.
Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.
Finally, there is health care. Every cliche Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs.
Every morning you can see the Northampton merchants sweeping the sidewalk in front of their stores. But today the sidewalk has tents set up for a big outdoor sale.
At Faces they have to mop their new rubber turquoise entranceway, rather than sweep it.
But such concerns of the day are of little interest to First Church, which views downtown from the perspective of centuries.
I saw a friend of mine going into the side door, and asked him if I could go inside. He said yes and I got to see the very nice lounge area in back.
From the outside this section of the ancient building looks quite drab.
But from the inside you can see the room exploding with colors from the stained glass windows.
Hopefully I'll have the chance to explore more of the inside someday.
The first sense I had that Charlie Ryan was in trouble in his 2007 re-election bid was from the TV screen; when I saw those ads with Dom Sarno and the trash cans. At first I was pleased to note that Sarno had a bright red Commerce sweatshirt on, but by the time the ad was over I was mad.
I was mad because Sarno was promising in that ad something I knew he couldn't deliver - the repeal of the trash fee. I had never supported the fee - whatever else was wrong with Springfield, it wasn't that the citizens were under-taxed. After all the pain that Springfield had been put through by the Albano's and the Keoughs and the Phillips and the sleazes and incompetents of every stripe, the citizens didn't deserve a tax hike on top of it. I thought it showed a lack of understanding by the Control Board to insist on such a thing.
But the key point was that the Control Board, and not the elected officials like Ryan or Sarno, were the only one's with the authority to repeal the fee. They had already firmly stated that they had no intention of doing so. So Ryan had no power to repeal the fee, and Sarno knew that, yet he was blaming Ryan for not doing so. Sarno also knew that if he himself were elected mayor, the Control Board would still be in control and he would be helpless to repeal the fee. And that is exactly what happened.
So even by political standards - hell, even by Springfield standards - Sarno's ad was about as bold-faced an act of outright lying and conscious deception as you could imagine. I knew Charlie would be at a great disadvantage against those ads, because Ryan is too much of a gentleman to stoop to the level needed to match that kind of dirty fight.
And there were other disadvantages Ryan brought to the race. Bringing Springfield back from the brink of fiscal disaster had required making some very difficult decisions. It meant firing some popular people who were none the less doing a lousy job. People like Springfield Police Chief Paula Meara, who everybody liked but who no one thought was getting a handle on Springfield's rising crime rate. The fear of crime, both real and imagined, is a major barrier to Springfield's recovery, since no one wants to live where they don't feel safe. The middle-class is not returning to Springfield until crime is under control. Crime fighting in Springfield needed a fresh face.
The problem was Meara didn't want to go. She rallied her friends, made angry statements and called in her lawyers. In the end Charlie had to expend a tremendous amount of political capital and taxpayer's money to ease Meara off the stage. You might say he staked his entire second term on relieving Springfield's crime problem through shaking up the upper ranks of the police department, beginning with the Chief. The man chosen to replace Meara was a state official named Edward Flynn.
I met Flynn only once, at some political shindig held at the artspace the Keith Sikes Gang used to run out of the old Valley Bank Space in Tower Square (to some of us forever Baystate West). Here is a video I shot that day.
So after all Charlie had gambled on Edward Flynn, when the news reached me in rehab that Flynn had suddenly quit to take a job in the Midwest, I knew Charlie was finished. Flynn's departure, after having been in town such a short time, killed any chance that Ryan could run on the crime issue. Since battling crime had been the centerpiece of Ryan's second term, and now he couldn't run on it without bringing up the embarrassment of having lost the man he bought out Meara for, and with Sarno's dishonest ads all over TV, I knew Charlie was finished. There was nothing for me to do than to ring the nurse for more medication.
Of course what's causing me to recall all these things is the big scandal that has erupted out west over an illicit romance Flynn has gotten caught up in. It's the sort of sordid affair that ruins a man's career and ultimately overshadows all his other accomplishments. Whether he manages to hold onto his job or not is irrelevant, Flynn's day is done.
I'm sure Flynn is preoccupied now with the firestorm of media surrounding him, and coping with the personal fall-out of having betrayed his wife. But I hope, in the course of it all, he pauses perhaps for a moment to consider another person he let down, a man who staked his mayoralty on his character, and who he also betrayed. I hope Flynn thinks a little bit about karma. About how when you do something wrong to someone, something bad has a tendency to happen to you a little further down the road.
Karma - What goes around comes around. Looks like its coming round to you, Chief Flynn.
